Three Books on Life

...as Avicenna Ibn Sina (c. 980–1037), a Persian physician whose "Canon of Medicine" was a standard textbook in Europe for centuries. said in his Book of Animals: if more semen flows out during intercourse than nature can tolerate, it is more harmful than if forty times as much blood had flowed out. Thus, it was not without reason that the ancients wished the Muses and Minerva The Roman goddess of wisdom and strategic warfare. to be virgins. That Platonic saying looks toward this: When Venus threatened the Muses that she would arm her son Cupid, the god of desire. against them unless they practiced her sacred sexual rites, the Muses replied: "O Venus, threaten Mars with such things; for your Cupid does not fly among us." Finally, nature has separated no sense further from intelligence than the sense of touch Ficino, following Plato, believed that while sight and hearing were "higher" senses that led to the soul, touch was the most "material" and "low" sense, often distracting from intellectual pursuits..

The second monster is the fullness of wine and food.The second monster is the satiety of wine and food. Indeed, if wine is either too much or too hot and intense, it will fill the head itself with the worst humors and foul vapors. I pass over the fact that drunkenness makes men insane. But too much food, first of all, calls back all the power of nature to the stomach for the sake of digestion. As a result, one cannot attend to the head and to contemplation at the same time. Furthermore, if food is poorly digested, it blunts the edge of the mind with many thick vapors and humors. Even if it is sufficiently digested, as Galen A 2nd-century Greek physician whose theories on the four humors dominated Western medicine. says, the soul—suffocated by fat and blood—cannot perceive anything celestial. Finally, the third monster is staying awake late into the night, especially after dinner; which then forces you to sleep after sunrise. Since many scholars err and deceive themselves in this, I will explain more fully why the fourth thing harms one's genius original: "ingenio". In this context, it refers to the innate intellectual capacity or "spark" of the scholar., and I will bring forward seven principal reasons: the first from heaven itself; the second from the elements; the third from the humors; the fourth from the order of things; the fifth from the nature of the stomach; the sixth from the spirits In Renaissance medicine, "spirits" were subtle substances that acted as the bridge between the physical body and the immaterial soul.; and the seventh derived from the imagination.

}In the beginning, three planets—just as we said in the previous sections—greatly favor contemplation and eloquence: the Sun, Venus, and Mercury. These, moving together at almost the same pace, flee from us as night approaches. But when day is either approaching or already rising, they rise again and visit us once more. After sunrise, however, they are said to be found in the twelfth region of the sky, which astronomers assign to prison and darkness In traditional astrology, the 12th House is known as the "House of Self-Undoing" or "Imprisonment." Ficino suggests that even if the Sun is up, its position in this specific house makes it unfavorable for intellectual work.. Therefore, it is not those who write either at night when these planets flee us, or during the day after the sun has risen when they enter the house of prison and darkness, but those who write near the time they are seeking their rising, or are already rising, for contemplation...